Squeezed Arm Puppy for Raspberry Pi, alpha4

Please post any bugs you have found
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Hans
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Joined: Thu 16 Mar 2006, 22:38
Location: The Netherlands

Re: wifi

#211 Post by Hans »

woodenshoe wrote:My wifi dongle worked in Raspberrian so I did a lsmod from the command line to figure out which kernel module it was using.

Although it wasn't listed in Puppy's network module list I could load it by clicking on the "More" tab and then on the "Specify" button, but it still couldn't find any new interface.

I thought I saw some kind of error message during boot up before X came up so I exited X ( you could ctrl+alt+F1 to see the boot messages and ctrl+alt+F4 to go back to X ) and that was how I found out that the kernel module for my wifi dongle couldn't find one of its files in the /lib/firmware directory.

I copied everything from Raspberrian's /lib/firmware directory to Puppy's /lib/firmware, probably overkill, and then my wifi worked.
Yeah, good suggestion, I will give this a go. But if I run in to trouble I might decide to compile a new driver. Wat kernel source sfs can I use? It is not listed in the kernel source repo.

Greetings,
Hans

woodenshoe

Kernel Source

#212 Post by woodenshoe »

I copied the kernel from Raspbian, I didn't compile it but I had come across a page describing how to do it.

http://elinux.org/Rpi_kernel_compilation

I don't know if that's the same source as was used for Puppy but I think it should work because copying the kernel worked.

EDIT:
It's Raspbian not Raspberrian :oops:
Last edited by woodenshoe on Fri 02 Aug 2013, 01:53, edited 1 time in total.

Hans
Posts: 45
Joined: Thu 16 Mar 2006, 22:38
Location: The Netherlands

raspberrian kernel in puppy

#213 Post by Hans »

You copied the entire kernel? So not only the firmware in /lib/firmware. I can try that too but I would like to stick with the original 3.1.6-cutdown kernel from Barry.
Did he not use T2 source? I think I read something like that but can't remember where.
Thanks for the tips woodenshoe , I will give it a go, and if I can get my hands on the original kernel source from Barry I will try that too and see what happens.


Anyone out there knows where I can download the kernel source sfs for the squeezed arm puppy that Barry used? I would like to stick to the original source if possible.

dancytron
Posts: 1519
Joined: Wed 18 Jul 2012, 19:20

#214 Post by dancytron »

The kernel that Barry used way back when is very obsolete from when they were first getting their feet on the ground. It has lots of problems that have been fixed along the way.

If you don't want to deal with the kernel yourself, you can use Berryboot, which will install Puppy along with several other distributions in a multiboot kind of situation sharing a fairly recent, good, kernel.

Hans
Posts: 45
Joined: Thu 16 Mar 2006, 22:38
Location: The Netherlands

kernel source sap

#215 Post by Hans »

Aha, so that's why. I'll try newer kernel source then. Nice option though, the Berryboot multi boot.

thanks!

dancytron
Posts: 1519
Joined: Wed 18 Jul 2012, 19:20

#216 Post by dancytron »

The berryboot thing is interesting and seems to work really well.

I am not 100% on how it works, but it uses squashfs files and layers like puppy. One layer a read only file system for the OS and then the changes (stuff that would go in the save file in a puppy frugal install) is just in a folder and layered on top of it.

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MU
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#217 Post by MU »

I made a Puppybrowser pet for Puppy Sap4:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 248#694248

Cheers, Mark
[url=http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=173456#173456]my recommended links[/url]

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L18L
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Location: www.eussenheim.de/

#218 Post by L18L »

MU wrote:I made a Puppybrowser pet for Puppy Sap4:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 248#694248

Cheers, Mark

Forum index » House Training » Bugs ( Submit bugs )


Where is the bug :wink:

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hellokitty
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Joined: Sat 06 Apr 2013, 11:08

#219 Post by hellokitty »

Getflash does not work, the package manager has no flash under the arm6 section and adobe flash in the normal debian section does not want to install. I don't see any external flash file anywhere for Puppi.

Can somebody explain to me as if I was 90 years old how to install flash for chromium?.

Sylvander
Posts: 4416
Joined: Mon 15 Dec 2008, 11:06
Location: West Lothian, Scotland, UK

#220 Post by Sylvander »

First attempts with R-Pi.
1. See this post in my thread on this topic.

2. Tried to boot "Puppy Raspberry Pi alpha 4" [on a 16GB card], and got NOTHING! :(

3. Wheezy [on a separate 16GB card] boots OK on the same hardware setup, but I think I've corrupted it by a previous improper power-off when I couldn't see the password characters going up on screen as I typed them.
Duh! :oops:
I didn't know at that time that they are NEVER displayed, and that is by design.

laszlok53
Posts: 16
Joined: Wed 11 Jul 2012, 10:42

#221 Post by laszlok53 »

Sylvander wrote:First attempts with R-Pi.
1. See this post in my thread on this topic.

2. Tried to boot "Puppy Raspberry Pi alpha 4" [on a 16GB card], and got NOTHING! :(

3. Wheezy [on a separate 16GB card] boots OK on the same hardware setup, but I think I've corrupted it by a previous improper power-off when I couldn't see the password characters going up on screen as I typed them.
Duh! :oops:
I didn't know at that time that they are NEVER displayed, and that is by design.
See on page 13, Woodenshoe explains how to make Puppy to boot

/ L

dancytron
Posts: 1519
Joined: Wed 18 Jul 2012, 19:20

#222 Post by dancytron »

The kernel in SAP is obsolete and won't run on newer Pi's.

The easiest way to get Puppy on the Pi is to use Berryboot. Google for it.

There is another thread for it on here too.

As far as I know, there is no way to get flash to run on the Pi, no matter what OS you use.

Sylvander
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Joined: Mon 15 Dec 2008, 11:06
Location: West Lothian, Scotland, UK

#223 Post by Sylvander »

WOOHOO! :D
Berryboot is brilliant! :D
So easy to do, and works really well.
I used it to install Puppy and 1 other OS.
Puppy runs just fine.
Fills the screen.
Icons are a good size [I'd like to be able to see stuff OK from the far side of my livingroom].
May need to increase the size of text.

Thanks guys. :)

BTW: How should I run Youtube videos on this Puppy?
Will Flashplayer install/run?

Edit: typing this from SAP for R-Pi...
Only some of the keys on the keyboard work [right-side keys don't]; don't know which keyboard to specify.
Flashplayer won't download/install using getflash...
Installed Gnash, but that seems to not work.
Iceweasel rather slow.
Zoom has enlarged Iceweasel display. :D
Global increase of text size has improved matters here and there.
Some text is tiny. :( e.g. In Xfe.

amj
Posts: 75
Joined: Fri 28 Jan 2011, 19:20

#224 Post by amj »

Has the Puppy for RPi initative expired?

When I first tried to buy a RPi in February 2012 I was told that the device was temporarily unavailable. In April I was allowed to put my name on a waiting list and in June I was allowed to place an order. The device was finally dispatched to me in December.

I experimented with the 'official' Debian for RPi, but of course what I really wanted was Puppy. Over a period of time I made several attempts at getting Alpha 4 up and running without even the slightest success. In addition to Debian I've been running Fedora and openELEC on my RPi. Fedora is less awful than Debian and openELEC is actually quite good (it more or less turns the RPi into a worthwhile purchase). But none of them are Puppy.

Although I've dived into this thread several times, it wasn't until a few days ago that I found the post from woodenshoe on page 13 that explains how to get alpha 4 to boot on an RPi version 2.

So OK, I've now managed to get Alpha 4 to boot up. I'm online and I can browse the web.

The instructions that woodenshoe gave come in two parts. Making changes to the boot partition of Alpha 4 is easy. Even my Win2000 system can do it. But the changes to the puppy partition are a different matter.

My Lucid Puppy 525 system can't mount the puppy partition on the SD card. It gives an error. My Mandriva system can recognise the puppy partition as ext4 but can't mount it. I tried running SolusOS from a live CD. It can mount the partition but SolusOS is a Debian derivative. It won't give me write access.

So my first question is: Is there a Puppy version that can mount the Alpha 4 puppy partition? If there is, I will happily download the iso file.

The next issue is: woodenshoe talks about switching kernels to 3.2.27. But the world has moved on. If you now download the rpi-firmware-master from https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-firmware/ ... master.zip it does not contain the 3.2.27 kernel. It now seems to reference Kernel version 3.6.11.

My attempts at switching to Kernel version 3.6.11 have all collapsed ignominiously. Of course it's probably my fault. I'm not a Linux geek, just a hobbist who happens to love Puppy Linux.

So my second question is: Will there ever be a version 4.0.1 of the Alpha 4 img.xz file that incorporates the changes that woodenshoe described?. It would be a great help people like me who want to load Puppy on their version 2 RPi's.

As for an Alpha 5, I dont even dare ask the question.


Posted from my RPi running Alpha 4.

woodenshoe

Not mounting partition

#225 Post by woodenshoe »

I ran into the same problem with the second partition not mounting if I clicked on the drive icon, but strangely enough it would mount from the command line.

Code: Select all

mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt/sdb2
Replace sdb2 with whatever is correct for you.

After mounting you can just click on the drive icon to look at the partition, and unmount it from the menu like normal, it is only mounting that doesn't work.

This worked for me in lupu 528. In racy 5.5.1 there was no problem in the first place, but you don't need to download a new version of puppy if the mount command above works.

Since it sounds like you can boot with the original kernel, you could try downloading or copying the rpi-firmware-master.zip from a usb stick to the Raspberry Pi and unpack the new kernel modules there. You can have several versions of kernel modules in /lib/modules (each in their own directory) but a new kernel won't boot without a matching set of it's own modules. (Actually I have booted a new kernel I had compiled for my laptop and loaded the wrong savefile that didn't have the new kernel modules in it and it booted up to the desktop just fine except that the mouse and keyboard didn't work... :wink: )

I did try the new kernel 3.6.11+ and it does work too. The second boot is faster than the first, for some reason it needed to look at my mouse and keyboard several times during the first boot. The pinboard didn't load on the first boot either, just a black screen with the task bar at the bottom. Simply rebooting fixed it though.

The file /tmp/bootkernel.log would give you an idea if any firmware is missing. Booting by itself my Raspberry Pi wasn't missing any, but depending on what kind of wifi dongle you attach you may need additional firmware to make it functional. As far as I know firmware files are architecture independent and could be copied from any distro that has the right ones.

amj
Posts: 75
Joined: Fri 28 Jan 2011, 19:20

#226 Post by amj »

Many thanks for these notes.

I think I'm going to have some fun later this week with another round of experimentation ...

Image

Sylvander
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Joined: Mon 15 Dec 2008, 11:06
Location: West Lothian, Scotland, UK

#227 Post by Sylvander »

How come the Puppy for RasPi doesn't include the raspi-config command?
So how should I change the RAM-split?

woodenshoe

config.txt

#228 Post by woodenshoe »

The raspi-config command edits various config files but the one that defines the gpu_mem setting is config.txt.

It can be found on the first (boot) partition of the SD card. If running Puppy click on mm0p1 in the bottom left corner of the desktop.

A description of all the various options can be found here http://elinux.org/RPiconfig.

amj
Posts: 75
Joined: Fri 28 Jan 2011, 19:20

#229 Post by amj »

@woodenshoe: Thank you for your help. I've had alpha 4 running with the 3.6.11+ kernel for a while now and it's going reasonably well.

For anyone who is interested, here is some feedback on what I've been seeing.

What works?

Let's start with the good stuff. Within 3 hours of first boot I was satisfied that there was enough functionality that simply worked 'out of the box' to make it worth trying to develop the system. Specifically, e-mail, web browsing (+ ad blocking), bit-torrent, playing audio (music) and streaming internet radio all worked at the first attempt. There are blemishes, odd bits of functionality that don't quite work as they should, but the mainline functionality is present and correct.

Since I've run both Debian and Fedora on the RPi, I can happily confirm that (as you would expect) Puppy is an order of magnitude faster than those systems. That's not to say Puppy is fast, but it delivers fairly acceptable response times rather than being forever painfully slow.

What doesn't work

Looking at the system I soon realised I was missing an image viewer. Viewnior wasn't in the system. The package manager listed a Viewnior pet package as being available but could not download it. So I went to the repository and downloaded it manually. It's been omitted for a simple reason. It does not work.

While looking at the repository I noticed the ntfs_3g-20111121-static-armv6.pet package and wondered if it was in the build. I've needed to add it manually on other Puppy systems. It's the same for alpha 4. Fortunately the ntfs_3g package does work and after installing it I could write to my NTFS formatted drives.

Clock

The RPi does not have a hardware clock so the functionality to set the hardware clock from an NTP server (which is in the build) seems a little superflous. Unfortunately the 'set date and time' function also seems to be faulty. I can set the date but not the time. Changing the date resets the time to 00:00. There is no other option. If I change the date at midnight I can have the correct date and time for as long as I keep the RPi powered up. But of course after a power-down the time is wrong once more.

Network and optical drives

If I plug a disc into the back of my router I can access it via NAS on most of the systems I use (including Lucid Puppy 525) but it does not seem to work on alpha 4.

I have a couple of old optical drives with their own power supplies. I tried them with alpha 4. When I inserted a CD or DVD nothing happened. However opening a console and mounting the disc from the command line does work (although there is no icon on the Pinboard). Nevertheless, you can make the data available to an application that needs it.

Package Manager
edit -- this paragraph is only half correct, see two posts further.

The Puppy package manager in alpha 4 isn't a great deal of help. The one useful thing it will do is uninstall any unwanted packages you may have tried out as an experiment. I asked the package manager to download database information for the repositories it knew about. It did that quite successfully and then threw up a syntax error for each entry in the databases. That took about 90 minutes. In other words, downloading from the Debian squeeze armel repository via the package manager is off the menu.

Adding applications

Installing Debian applications manually is tedious. Made worse by Debian's habit of splitting everything up into large numbers of tiny packages. But so far I've not found any other option. So I browsed the repository looking for something both small and useful. An image viewer to replace Viewnior seemed the obvious choice. GeeQie is two packages with 9 dependencies. Pfind was able to tell me that three of the dependencies were already resolved. The remaining six dependencies have a further five dependencies of their own (none resolved). So I downloaded the 13 packeges and installed them in more or less bottom up order. I'm happy to say the GeeQie viewer runs very nicely on alpha 4 (and it's a much more capable viewer than Viewnior). I used Geany to edit the 'defaultimageveiwer' script so as to launch 'geeqie-standard' and all is working well.

A real bug?

The various bugs and blemishes I have encountered have been benign. Various little things that don't work as they should, but don't to any damage to the system either. There is one exception. I did once loose the system and need to do a complete re-install. There is something wrong with the functionality that allows the user to make cosmetic changes to the Pinboard. For example, if you select an alternative icon theme, Puppy thereafter shows all drives as unmounted. On the occasion I lost the system the sequence that led up to the crash was: I changed the icon theme, and then edited one of the icons so that it launched a different application. I then noticed that all the drives were being shown as unmounted and decided to switch back to the standard icon theme. A few seconds later X died and took the system down permanently. It was back to the dd command.

To GPU or not to GPU?

The hardware information function tells me that Puppy can see all of the RAM but apparently can't see the GPU. This becomes immediately obvious if you ask Gnome Media Player to play a video. It's clearly trying to render video using the rather slow main processor rather than using the super-fast GPU. I'm also running openELEC on the RPi and have been impressed by the RPi's ability to play h.264 encoded HD video. Even 1920x1080 BD rips play smoothly most of the time. So Puppy seems to be ignoring the RPi's main asset. Then again, I guess that's OK. It's easy enough to swap SD cards and boot the RPi up in openELEC when I want to watch video. What I need from Puppy is a system that will do normal everyday computing tasks on the RPi and in that respect, alpha 4 looks quite promising.
Last edited by amj on Fri 07 Jun 2013, 14:46, edited 1 time in total.

dancytron
Posts: 1519
Joined: Wed 18 Jul 2012, 19:20

#230 Post by dancytron »

I am running SAP Alpha 4 using Berryboot. I've updated it to the most recent kernel that Berryboot uses.

The automatic clock setting from the internet seems to work for me, but I did have to reboot.

As far as the graphics acceleration, the only way to get accelerated video on the R Pi is to use "omxplayer" which is the custom player made for the R. Pi. It seems to be more or less a command line equivalent to mplayer.

So any reasonable video solution is going to have to be some sort of front end for omxplayer. This is what they did to make xbmc work. I don't know how hard it would be, but gmplayer and also the gtk-youtube application might be able to be adapted to use omxplayer as its backend instead of mplayer. I assume that would fix the video issues.

As far as what works, I'd add that CUPS and rdesktop both work well. The main thing I have been using it for is as a print server (freeing my laptop from the desk) and as a thin client to my Windows XP machine.

I installed rdesktop and grdesktop from the Puppy Package Manager without any problem.

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